Echo

Esports involve fast-paced action and sophisticated strategies that are sometimes hard to fully appreciate with the naked eye. Echo is a production tool for Dota 2 that detects extraordinary performances by comparing live match data to millions of historic matches.

The operator can see at a glance how players perform relative to previous performances of the same hero, the player’s personal history, or all matches played. Echo highlights outstanding performances, may it be all time records, top performances or poor play.

Echo helps content producers to monitor and interpret how each player performs for a set of key performance indicators

Content producers can inspect each performance in more depth including a histogram of past performances, descriptive statistics, current records and more. This helps the operator contextualise the given data point and judge its narrative quality.

Echo is a tool for data-driven storytelling, which means a core feature is the automatic generation of audience-facing graphics that the audience can understand and interpret at-a-glance. Echo provides a one-click mechanism to present extraordinary performances to the audience, giving the stats person direct control over supplementing commentary with data-driven stories.

Echo’s graphics are designed to provide an at-a-glance message about a player’s performance

Echo is the first product from an ongoing project on data-driven storytelling in esports, based at the Digital Creativity Labs. Please get in touch if you are a game developer or content creator and would like to explore the use of Echo for your game or broadcast – we routinely collaborate with industry partners to translate our research products into real-world impact.